Like a bolt from the blue, Guitar Hero had one last encore.
After Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock ended the five year run of multiple Guitar Hero, Band Hero, and DJ Hero games, Activision put the entire series on ice due to low returns and oversaturation. This, combined with the late 2000's recession, led to a massive downturn for the series. One game, allegedly being made by Vicarious Visions, who worked on the On Tour series, was cancelled by 2012, leading to no real information coming out of Activision for years.
Vicarious Visions experimented for two years on how to revive the series, including a first person perspective for the player to go back to a singular instrument (the guitar) as the focus. Allegedly, Activision set a lower budget for this Guitar Hero game, to the point where achieving master recordings and licensing for tracks was incredibly difficult. These experiments ultimately ended, but Activision decided to reboot the series afterwards, supposedly turning some of that work in with developer FreeStyleGames, who worked on the DJ Hero series.
Things changed by 2015, when Activision announced that Guitar Hero would return with Guitar Hero Live, serving as a full reboot of the entire franchise. According to Activision, Guitar Hero still had a major following online, citing the Guitar Hero Facebook Page having 10 million followers. It may seem silly now, but it was clear Activision, despite putting the series on ice, was always considering a comeback.
While the Vicarious Visions version was cancelled in 2012, FreeStyleGames began working on Guitar Hero Live around the same time. FreeStyleGames was fortunate to continue working with Activision for smaller-risk games, most notably Sing Party for the Wii U. After Sing Party, Activision approached FreeStyleGames to consider making a new Guitar Hero, and in a rare move, gave FreeStyleGames reasonable freedom to experiment with the development of the game.
It was decided early on to rebuild Guitar Hero with Guitar Hero Live. To push themselves away from the rest of the series, they purposefully rebuilt the games formula and look from scratch, which did lead to some major gameplay choices that make Guitar Hero Live stand out from the previous entries of the series, but also make it super experimental - often to the games detriment.
The first major design choice was to put the camera in a first person perspective. It's unknown if this was a holdover from the cancelled Vicarious Visions project, but FreeStyleGames felt that the perspective change; of being the guitarists, would allow for a more immersive, realistic approach to how players perceive their guitar playing. To facilitate this, FreeStyleGames decided to use Full Motion Video as the backdrop to your guitar playing, having a live band and crowd to play for.
The use of FMV was a bold choice, but it is one of the better decisions in Guitar Hero Live despite some inherent goofiness. With the new first-person perspective, FreeStyleGames was able to digitally recreate realistic-looking concert venues with hundreds of actors and session musicians actually playing the instruments with you. The simulation is enhanced by the use of a robotic camera system, which was programmed to simulate the motions of a guitarist on stage, and using choreographed sequences between positive and negative reactions to your guitar playing.
This was all combined with green screen to film hundreds of extras as crowds of fans, along with editing of their footage to get diverse reactions from those near the front of the stage. FreeStyleGames also got real concert footage for the far shots of crowds, superimposing them and adding positional audio to sweeten the video simulation. The effect, all combined, works great, and gives Guitar Hero Live an identity all to its own that allows it to differentiate itself from the previous titles.
The push for realism and simulation is not unusual. Rock Band 3 was a turning point in utilizing rhythm games as a teaching tool for real guitar playing, and for good or ill, it was the primary mindset for players to embrace a more realistic take after the more over-the-top, cartoonish style of Warriors of Rock. The format also necessitated a change in gameplay, which is one of the more controversial aspects of Guitar Hero Live, as they upended the entire gameplay loop of Guitar Hero with something new.
The basic gameplay is mostly the same, players would use a guitar controller peripheral to hit notes on a chart with the strum bar. Where it changes is note presentation and style. Previous games in the series had the five colored button design, but Guitar Hero Live instead features six buttons, arranged into two rows of three. The note chart this time has three scrolling lanes instead of five, which contain black or white notes that represent the two rows on the controller.
The new layout is interesting and works, but to say the least, it does take time to get used to it. One of the harder issues is knowing when to strum which row, as represented by the guitar-pick styled note, either pointed down or upwards, respectively. You also have barre notes, where you need to hit both the top and bottom at the same time, represented by the square notes. Switching up between the two is something harder difficulties will utilize heavily, along with sustained notes and chords being thrown into the mix. FreeStyleGames did try to relegate the top row for power chords, with the bottom row being modifications, but it depends on which song you are playing to hash that out.
Otherwise, most of the other features are still intact. Hammer-on's and pull-off notes are still there and visibly marked, open strumming is available as an obvious horizontal bar across the chart lanes, and you still gain star power and operate it as normal. The design is solid, FreeStyleGames put in a lot of work to make the charts feel unique and, in harder difficulties, a fair challenge for players.
There are some problems, however. I applaud FreeStyleGames for swinging big with the changes to try and make Guitar Hero feel fresh, but the new aesthetics work against their push for the simulation. Two major issues arise in this case; note location on the peripheral, and sense of realism. Since there are only six notes in an even section at the top of the guitar controller, finger placement is important but somewhat cumbersome as it's relegated to a single section on the guitar. It stimulates hitting real strings, but their placement is too cramped and the orientation of fingers can stumble over each other, especially in harder sections of a song where precise note strumming is required.
The second issue is the sense of realism. With the first person perspective and FMV appearance, Guitar Hero Live is going for a realistic approach with the gameplay that just doesn't stick the landing. The location of your notes and relation to the charting still feels artificial versus a simulation, and pales in comparison to the training tools and pro versions of songs from Rock Band 3. This in truth is not a dealbreaker, but that verisimilitude is lost in a way that FreeStyleGames may not have expected.
It should be noted that a lot of fans complained about the changes to the aesthetics and note layouts, though critics enjoyed most of the changes because it was so fresh, and in contrast to the recently released Rock Band 4, attempting to push boundaries. Gameplay does take time to get used to, but what was lost in the new gameplay mechanics was one of the major ways Guitar Hero became popular - universal appeal. If there is one problem Guitar Hero Live has, it is a very unfriendly game to casual players, which is perhaps the biggest issue of all for a rhythm game.
Of course, that is a double edged sword. Previous Guitar Hero games were lauded for their challenge and difficulty, but it was the immediate access to the guitar controller, its simplistic layout and color-coded notes, was never a major barrier of entry. There are less tracks, yes, to follow in Guitar Hero Live, but the layout is more complex due to the top/bottom note selection and the overall design of the controller itself, making simple chords and song sections a bit more troublesome without a lot of practice.
Perhaps that kind of impatience spoiled a lot of players, but there are two more major problems that hold back Guitar Hero Live: the song setlist, and their DLC strategy. The in-game setlist is fairly mediocre, with only 42 songs in total, with most of the representation being an attempt at diversity outside of the general rock genre. Some major additions salvage the set list, The Rolling Stones " Paint it Black", The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" and Imagine Dragon's "Demons" are solid choices for sure. FreeStyleGames though added several tracks that just don't fit the setlist or tone, such as Eminem, Skrillex, Katy Perry and Rhianna, to name a few.
You get songs from major bands like The Killers, Paramore, Queen, and Pearl Jam of course, but they are not major hits, or in some cases, songs previously released during the late 2000's push of the games. This combines with another problem, one that is moreso an issue in hindsight versus when the game came out; the lack of DLC. I say hindsight because FreeStyleGames included a new DLC plan, nicknamed GHTV, which launched with 200 songs to play…for a price.
GHTV forgoes the DLC model used from the previous games, and provided a growing library of songs free of charge for players with drop-in and out gameplay. There are, however, two major catches. The first, is that no new footage would be shot, so previous recordings of the session bands, live recordings of the actual bands, or music videos were used, while dubbing the song over the band playing. The second catch is that the songs were on rotation, attempting to mimic the likes of MTV by having songs available for a limited time before disappearing for a while.
There was one method to playing songs outside of any rotation; this was through in-game rewards, or more prominently, microtransactions. Players could spend in-game currency earned by playing the game for a free-play of a song, netting them tokens for free access to a song. Or, they can spend as low as $.99 cents for 300 'Hero Cash' currency, and purchase tokens outright, roughly 6 to 7 per $.99 cents. There were also other passes and exchanges made available, including a 24 hour party pass for $19.99 that gave you unlimited access to all on demand songs and features.
The benefit was immediate access, along with FreeStyleGames being able to secure licensing rights with artists more easily and more cheaply; having a song available for a month, and not allowing unlimited access, is much cheaper than five years and purchasable licenses, of course. The rotations also added a ton of songs, with hundreds of pretty good songs from Guitar Hero's past getting the Guitar Hero Live charting, along with a bunch of new acts never featured in a Guitar Hero game before. In practice though, it meant less control by the player unless they were willing to purchase songs. It is technically free, but over time more expensive than the older DLC model due to the microtransaction prices essentially evening out to $.17 cents per one play of a song.
To say the least, the system is a mixed bag. The concept is again solid, but the implementation, which is the problem. It is also a moot point now, as GHTV is officially offline, meaning all of those songs are no longer playable, even if you spent tokens on them. So of the 484 songs for Guitar Hero Live, only the fairly middling on disk setlist is now available. The shuttering of GHTV actually led to a class action lawsuit against Activision by several players, citing the sudden shutdown in 2018 was without proper notice, which prompted Activision to provide refunds for players who purchased Guitar Hero Live between 2017 - 2019.
The loss of GHTV, which was a feature with mixed reception to begin with, is the death nail for Guitar Hero Live. I again applaud the attempt at a new direction for the series, but the experimental nature of the game simply doesn't gel to make a satisfying experience. After GHTV shut down, there is really little reason other than curiosity to try out Guitar Hero Live, and as of time of writing, it is the last Guitar Hero game released, with no immediate plans to release a new game from Activision any time soon.
The legacy of Guitar Hero is ultimately one of dizzying highs and endless lows, but it is definitely a journey worth going on, one that makes it a curious part of the gaming landscape and, in some cases, a series worth exploring for yourself. Guitar Hero Live didn't stick the landing for the franchise, but it has enough interesting ideas that at least make it from being a total disaster. Still, it is a sour note to end on for the franchise, and we can only hope it gets one more shot at glory in the future.